No one ever asked me to sign the social contract. I don't remember being presented with a dotted line and a pen. Yet here I am, subject to the will of a state whose checks and balances are increasingly unchecked and unbalanced, and whose "democratic" machinery is so clogged with patronage and power that my chances of influencing it are close to zero.

The existence of the "social contract" is the great liberal myth under which we still labour. The theory is that we, as individuals, allow the state to curtail some of our liberties and in return, the state protects us from harm and uses its collective strength to advance society as a whole.

It's a nice theory, but it has a rather obvious flaw. A genuine contract is an agreement signed willingly by two consenting parties. The social contract, by contrast, is something we are coerced into simply by dint of being born. Try opting out of it in today's Britain and see how far it gets you; ask a gypsy or a traveller how long you'll last if you try living a life that doesn't fit with society's demands.

The reality of modern Britain is that the freedom of individuals is increasingly constrained by the state. In turn, the freedom of the state is constrained by an all-pervasive global capitalism. The result is that the state controls the lives of its citizens in order to serve the interests of corporations. We now live in a country in which hospitals are owned by supermarkets, schools are run by businessmen and corporations own and police entire city centres. The purpose of our education system is to turn our children into cogs in the corporate machine, and there can be no nobler national aspiration for UK PLC than Remaining Competitive In The Global Economy.

In times like this, the social contract becomes little more than a flimsy veil, failing to hide the naked power behind it. In theory, we live in a liberal democracy. In practice we are under the thumb of what William Cobbett memorably called "the Thing" – a great, lurking, self-serving power. Today's Thing is a hydra with two heads – corporation and state – and both have the same message for us: behave yourself, take out a loan, go shopping, keep the economy afloat. Your duty is not to be alert, active citizens but passive, obedient consumers. Oh, and if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide.

We are becoming a nation of enforced conformity. In this context, liberty means the freedom simply to be yourself. The freedom to go about your business without being watched by cameras; the freedom to make merry or make trouble on your own streets; the freedom to pursue alternatives to the consumer economy. It also means freedom from coercion: freedom from databases, identity cards, iris scans, fingerprints, random searches, imprisonment without trial or justification. It means, above all, having the freedom, and the power, to say no to the Thing.